En route to San Francisco, I spent a couple days in desert-spa-and-resort favorite, Tucson. While there, I went for an invigorating run, one afternoon, in the Catalina foothills, and then mapped my route at mapmyride, the site for those of us who seek quantitative affirmation of our physical fitness accomplishments.

The thing I like most about mapmyride is the point-and-click method of route mapping — with a few clicks of your mouse, the software makes the point-to-point connections and fills in the route and the distance — with a result that is both visual and numerical. Brilliant.

While running, I started thinking about those mapmyride connectors and their analogous equivalents in the human realm — friends, colleagues and acquaintances who put people and ideas together — and how invaluable they are to the flow of ideas and the transaction of commerce.

The premise of his book — and the accompanying video — is that great ideas don’t come from a single person having a Eureka! moment, but instead are the product a multiple minds working together in almost accidental ways due to chance encounters made via networked connections. He cites as examples the English coffee houses of the Enlightenment and the Parisian salons of Modernism, and talks about how the Internet is functioning in the same way today.

I was so taken by this video — not just the content, but also the illustrated form, that I had to share it. For my money, it’s well worth the 4-minute investment.